Finding Dr's in NA useful only for a yearly check-up (if you book early) as they are basically 'pill-pushers.' I dusted off my old RN and found that many of my family mental and physical health problems are due to Gluten-intolerance in that we are not getting the needed nuitrients for proper health. There is huge suffering here!! including 2 relatives dying from Lithium poisening and one cousin getting non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. I Found Truehope.com for brain nutrients which saved my bi/polar brother from Lithium. My dyspepsia (for which I was prescribed Nexem, a debilitating drug) I found that strong probotics cured it. For the MAO-A protein which was causing my anxiety & depression (I was prescribed debilitating anti-depressants) I found 'it' would 'eat' Amino acids instead, this from Canadian scientists. My father's dementia was probably caused by mercury poisoning. I suggest that you read "The Ultramind Solution" by Dr. Mark Hyman M.D. before making any more hurtful assumptions. One good thing is that I have become a Christian Universalist as clearly most of us "don't know what we are doing." esp. when making pronouncments about others. Carole McIvor, Canada

Does "mainstream" medicine work? Doctors have no remedies for the simplest of ailments like chronic headaches - leave alone serious diseases. Pharma companies keep inventing and re-inventing new molecules which soon become toothless against common pathogens and bacteria, because bacteria themselves evolve all the time to fight new drugs.

Patients continue to suffer physically, mentally and financially at the hands of doctors,hospitals, and the insurance-healthcare cartel.

Tobacco, fast foods and alcohol are hand in glove with the pharma industry in a "you scratch my back, I scratch yours" relationship.

Natural remedies, which have stood the test of history, healthy lifestyle activities like Yoga and meditation, healthy foods with proven curative properties are all actively discouraged - because a healthy population is unhealthy for drug companies.

I am a long-standing avid reader of The Economist with great admiration for your magazine's objectivity in reporting. But this article sucks. You have lost respect with me.

"Patients reward them by believing (wrongly but usefully) that it is the specifics of the therapy that are bringing relief, rather than the attention itself."

The quality of attention is surely the factor, not just attention. I've long believed that we heal from giving ourselves the "right" physical and social conditions. But what the "right" conditions for me are will not be the "right" conditions for you, no matter how specific the diagnosticians become in delineating the world of disease symptoms. So what does a good healing arts practitioner do? He or she helps one figure out what the "right" conditions are likely to be for me and then helps me to motivate myself to give myself such conditions. Whether that's called "conventional medicine" or "alternative medicine" or "health coaching" is irrelevant -- except to the society budgeteers, of course.

In regard to this rather misunderstood field, I think some data published in a McKinsey Quarterly in, I think 2006, is worth assessing. It correlates the attitude of the client/patient to the advice given with the fidelity of the client/patient to putting the advice into practice. A chart summarizing that correlation is at this URL:

I have been practicing as a surgeon for over 40 years. I happened to watch a video of a patient undergoing lobectomy (surgical removal of part of lung) under Acupuncture, while the patient was awake and drinking lemonade (He had no endotracheal tube or any other Anesthetic machines around to provide ventilation.) This video opened my closed mind (closed to the idea that anything other than western medicine can be effective treatment). I became curious, read about Acupuncture, was convinced that it is not just a placebo, got trained and has been practicing Acupuncture for over 10 years.

James Reston, a New York Times reporter, who had accompanied President Nixon during his visit to China, reported in the New York Times how he had appendectomy for acute appendicitis while there, and had his postoperative pain controlled by Acupuncture. Subsequent teams of physicians deputed to China by the AMA confirmed how Acupuncture was being used as effective treatment for various ailments. The Chinese have been using Acupuncture as part of Chinese Traditional Medicine for over 4000 years. We now know that Acupuncture works by releasing neuropeptides in the body. I have been amazed at some of the results of Acupuncture treatment where the typical western trained physician has told the patient that he has to live with the problem or continue to take the medications that has been causing side effects or to have surgery. Several patients have got rid of their long standing Migraine, back, neck, shoulder, elbow and knee pain as well as carpal tunnel syndrome with Acupuncture. It has helped to cure erectile dysfunction. Acupuncture helps to dilate small blood vessels and thus restore circulation. Acupuncture helped save an ischemic toe of an elderly female from amputation. Veterinarians use Acupuncture to treat animals in pain. Animals don't experience "placebo" effect.

While practicing in a small town, I met an elderly physician who had used hypnosis as the sole anesthetic (the hospital had no anesthesiologist at that time) to do all his surgeries including C-sections, appendectomies and fracture reductions. Again the non believer in me said "no way". But the "Open mind" in me said "look into it". Look I did. James Esdail(1808-1859) a Scottish surgeon posted in Calcutta as a physician for the East India Company had performed more than 2000 surgeries using solely hypnoanlgesia (prior to the discovery of Chloroform) and published a book called "Mesmerism in India and its practical application in Surgery and Medicine" in 1846. John Elliotson(1791-1868) founder of Mesmeric hospital in London, and James Braid (1795-1860) were two other physicians who used hypnosis for surgeries as also to treat several medical conditions in Britain.

I got trained in Hypnosis by the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis. During the training I met some physicians who have had major surgeries under self hypnosis. I have been using hypnotherapy for the past 30 years. I have helped patients to quit smoking, lose weight, overcome various phobias, pass examinations and even with erectile dysfunction. Hypnotherapy has helped to eliminate severe pain or reduce it to tolerable levels. When patients without medical insurance or are allergic to local anesthetic, come with minor surgical problems, I have successfully performed surgeries using hypnosis as the sole anesthetic. Recent studies using FMRI to investigate brain activity under hypnosis for pain suppression, has shown reduced activity in areas of the pain network and increased activity in other areas of the brain under hypnosis.

If one can believe in nanotechnology, why not in Homeopathy, which uses nano-particles in its medication? I know generations of families that have gone only to a Homeopathic practitioner for their ailments, all their lives.
Innumerable patients with various chronic ailments including paralysis have benefited from Ayurvedic treatment, which has been the traditional medicine of India for over 5000 years. Practice of Yoga which is part of Ayurveda has helped patients with chronic problems like hypertension, asthma, diabetes and arthritis. Researchers have documented the effectiveness of Meditation in reducing high blood pressure.

This article "All alternative medicine is bunk" published in the Economist, is a totally biased article and reveals how ignorant the author has been about Alternative medicine. Unfortunately China and India had no facilities to research their traditional medicine all these years and the pharmaceutical companies did not see any profit in funding them. Now, all the leading universities including Harvard and Yale have their own departments of Alternative Medicine. The NIH has funded the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine over 300 thousand dollars in 2006, 298 thousand in 2007 and 2008 and 295 thousand in 2009.

Is this article deliberately designed to inflame people's comments? No evidence is presented, sweeping generalizations are made, and yet, you expect people to accept the statements as "fact". In the not to distant past it was considered proper medical practice to drill oles in the skulls of suffering patients to cure diseases. Leeches were used believing they cured other problems. Cutting people so they would bleed was considered an effective treatment.

As our knowledge grows many past ideas have been shown to be, at best, invalid. Is it the authors position that we now know all there is to now and no need to seek further knowledge? Or is the author perhaps a paid consultant for big pharma?

Such an article strikes me as somewhat offensive to so many different people in widely varying fields of knowledge.

Do over, this time without the pre-conceived notions which are entirely unsupported.

Excellent article. A further reason alternative medicine remains popular is a variant of confirmation bias - patients with a terminal condition who survive after taking eye of newt are wont to crow about their miracle treatment. The non-survivors are less vocal.

Love it trackwhack! Dead Right:
given the new reputation of Delhi as the centre of drug-resistance - enough even to drive off even professional athletes, for whom EPO et al. seems a sponsorship prerequisite - I would have thought that the "effluence" of one of the "big 4" emerging economies was spreading far and wide. Well, I'm a FAN - so keep your Ayurveda for yourself! I'd short the Nifty thanks all the same - and may all the millions' hair stand on end. How much do the Chinese pay for dead elephant's tooth, when all said and done?
PS I can't trust Wikipedia anymore - you just wrote the article.
All the best

Sir,
you tell us that all you have is no evidence that alternative medicine works - yet, you come up with the granitic definitive certain conclusion that alternative medicine *does not* work.
Your use of scientific argumentation will reassure the cashiers at public health schools worldwide at these times of budget cuts. You just provided the much needed evidence that training in correctly interpreting the results of clinical experiments will be required for centuries to come.

The 95% number is interesting for one other statistical reason: most studies to test the effectiveness of drugs - to my knowledge - use a confidence interval of 95%. That means that in a meta-study of studies testing the effectiveness of actually ineffective drugs you would expect 5 to show an effect and 95 to show none. In conclusion there would even be doubts left for me as regards the 5% of the alternatie treatments that are supposedly working.

I commend you for denouncing this sadly prevalent quackery, also for noting the failure of modern medicine to fully consider the emotional component of treatment. There is, of course, the larger issue of the ever-increasing mistrust in science and modern medicine; the suspicion, even among educated adults, that scientists and doctors are beholden to hidden corporate or political agendas; the growing sense that what we are told by the scientific community is no more reliable than the proclamations of politicians, pundits, religious leaders, etc. In a way it's like a sea captain ignoring his navigational instruments and trusting magic crystals, or gut feelings instead. However, the public's suspicions are not so unreasonable. How do we restore trust in rationality, the scientific method, and the scientific community?

The problem is, there are legitimately effective "alternative medicines" that do work but no huge pharmaceutical company nor the FDA backs them. It is that 5% that works that causes the problems.

Look at ginger. This root is absolutely effective for stomach problems and nausea and is extremely cheap. No patents are possible as it is a wild organism. No drug company would spend millions of dollars to test and prove ginger is a safe medicine as they there is no barrier to entry for other companies to steal all the profits. Same story with most probiotics such as what you find in your yogurt. Then there are simple chemical compounds like salt or charcoal...

Because that 5% does work fantastically, and because there is no body that consumers can trust to distinguish that 5% from the other 95%, consumers are left to their own needs and devices. When you are ill, dying, or feeling mortal, then money isn't much of an object and you become willing to take a chance based on limited information.

I'd say the solution is a single organisation that scientifically tests all these non-profitable "alternative medicines" in a manner similiar to how the FDA does. Who provides the billions of dollars of funding that drug companies are able to for patentable drugs is another question. Perhaps a tax on all "alternative medicines"

I am posting this on behalf of my alternative practitioner friend Aspar Agus.
He writes "The life blood of journals such as the Economist is Big Business. Drugs don't always work - witness the scourge of MRSA and C. difficile: others have hideous side effects.
Expect a glowing report of GM foods next, accompanied by one praising new weed killers for such (widely suspected of killing bees): another praising the soon-to-be released G4 telephony."

I think Aspar has several good points there. Any practice of Medicine based purely on the profit motive is ethically bankcrupt and the fact is plain to see that most of big pharma is run today on naked capitalism. But is alternative medicine ethically more pure than conventional medicine?
Agaricus.

The second section of your article "visit more, listen more" makes sense. The first part, and the article title, look like prejudice. Emotions and background play their parts in health and a homeopath who takes the trouble to know the patient has an advantage over the eight minute doctor who you reference. If you want to consider alternative medicine more objectively you should make enquiry as to the level of satisfaction of patients from each type of service.

Why not take up an example of disease treatment where conventional medicine has had a vast effect ? I refer to the present treatment of peptic ulcer disease with H2 blockers and if necessary antibiotics. It is quite astonishing how the scene has changed from my early days in medicine. Nowadays there is almost no peptic ulcer surgery performed and the days of medical treatment with milk drips and so on are long gone. People can simply pick these drugs off the shelf in their local supermarket. Among the commonest admissions in my early days were haematemesis and melaena,and perforated peptic ulcers. Even the then conventional treatment with antacids and diet didn't prevent this. Alternative medicine was not then on the horizon but given the elucidation of the connection of peptic ulcer disease and the organism Helicobacter pylori it is doubtful if some millennia old chinese remedy,for example, could have had any effect. No placebo effect here - a demonstrably effective modern treatment. Oh that my father had had access to these drugs (he had to be operated on for pyloric stenosis caused by years of duodenal ulceration )

There is a difference between your article and Dr Ernst's research. While he sought to test the claims of alternative medicine practitioners, your intention is to impose a bold conclusion based on induction (there is no alternative, case is settled once and for all). I don't think this serves any other purpose but making the other side stick to their guns with even more determination. Most of us owe our lives to modern medicine and the great people who contributed to its development, and most alternative medicine is probably nonsense. But even so, more testing is a lot better than more preaching while ignoring the fallacy of induction. As a reader, I am more interested in Dr Ernst's and other's research than in The Economist's bold statements about medicine.

Why use the adjective 'alternative' in the statement. Most of the pills popped are little more than placebos (some very notable exceptions, found more by chance and exploiting mother nature). Are you impressed by having people in white coats and university degrees making definitive statements.

Science knows less than we (well, you) might assume. Its more statistical coincidence, rather than scientific proof, that leads to acclaim for drugs, such as 'Prozac'. Interestingly, some of the less publicized research on that drug suggest that it maybe the placebo affected a 'credible individual showing concern for a suffer' rather than the chemicals, that makes the impact on the patient.

While the world of alternative medicines is awash with quackery, the world of (what I assume you are calling) 'real' medicine is awash with corruption. Big companies trying to scare people into buying over-priced drugs that have marginal affects.

Alas is it left to a poor reader to tell the Economist, not to believe everything they read - especially if its written by a commercial organization